Thought experiment

Imagine the students who attend Iowa schools after the adoption of the Common Core. Imagine them when they are ten or twelve years out of school. Take a look at the standards. How many of those students, at age thirty, will have all the skills described in the standards? How many will be fluent in all of the math concepts listed in the standards? How much different will those numbers be than they are for the thirty-year-olds who attended Iowa schools before the Core standards? What evidence is there to think that the difference will be significant?

Of course, there is no right or wrong answer to this thought experiment. Maybe the Common Core will transform society as we know it. Or maybe not. My own feeling is that people attribute near-magical powers to K-12 education, when experience shows that the choice of one curriculum over another doesn’t make nearly as much difference in actual adult knowledge and abilities as we’d like to think it does.

This isn’t an argument against the Core per se—just an argument that it’s not so obviously and urgently important that it has to be imposed on everyone everywhere.
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A thousand things badly

One important objection to the Common Core standards is that they are inseparable from the larger project of high-stakes test-driven education. If they are not enforced by using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers’ adherence to them, then they’re largely toothless. But as soon as jobs and promotions and salaries become contingent on raising test scores, then the clear incentive is to focus on what gets tested to the exclusion of what doesn’t, which is very hard to defend. So then there’s pressure to put even more subjects into the standards and onto the tests. The Iowa Core covers several subjects in addition to those in the Common Core, but the absence of standards for art, for example, has led people to propose that they adopt standards (and a test??) for that, too. (And of course there are some qualities that won’t ever be assessed by a test score, like whether your kids’ school has a humane atmosphere and models humane values, and whether it provides enough time for physical activity, recess, and down time, and whether it provides an even minimally decent time period for lunch.)

The result, in Iowa, is that we have four hundred pages of “core” standards, and may end up with even more. Nobody wants to think about the fact that there are only so many hours in the school day (knock on wood), and that sometimes you have to choose between doing some things well and doing a thousand things badly. It’s a check-list approach to education that is driven more by the desire to say that the school “covers” certain material than by any concern for what the students actually learn.

The people enacting these standards—the national group that drew them up, the President and Congresspeople who pressured the states to adopt them, the Governor and his education department who proposed them, and the state legislators who approved them—have no idea whether they can be meaningfully satisfied within the confines of our school day and school year, or what their actual consequences will be on the school experience, or what teachers can realistically accomplish with their actual students. You know who does? Your kid’s teacher.
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What's wrong with a national curriculum?

Common Core supporters are adamant that “It’s not a national curriculum!” It’s true that the Common Core doesn’t prescribe one set of texts or one set of lesson plans. But the Core will clearly channel school districts into a narrow set of curricular choices. Once there is a detailed and extensive national set of standards and a set of corresponding standardized tests, how many real textbook options will there be? Our own district has shifted over to Houghton-Mifflin language arts textbooks that are specifically designed to satisfy the Common Core standards, and, from what I hear, many teachers hate them.

What Common Core supporters aren’t so good at explaining is why a national curriculum would be such a bad thing. In fact, almost all of the arguments offered to support the Common Core standards would support a national curriculum as well (as the host of the panel discussion I participated in astutely pointed out). It seems plain that Common Core supporters reject the idea of a national curriculum just because they are afraid it is unpopular, not because it goes against any of their principles. If they tried to articulate just why a national curriculum was a bad idea, they might find that their rationale is hard to square with their support for the Common Core.
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The Iowa Core speaks!

Perhaps I should just let the standards speak for themselves. Force yourself through this, from the introduction to the Iowa Core’s section on 21st Century Skills:

As each Iowa student is provided access to essential concepts and meaningful learning experiences in the core academic content areas, it is imperative that we also look to 21st century skills to build capacity in students so they are prepared to lead productive, satisfying lives. According to Ken Kay, president of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the 21st century skills set “is the ticket to economic upward mobility in the new economy” (Gewertz, 2007). Business and industry is providing a very clear message that students need the skills to “work comfortably with people from other cultures, solve problems creatively, write and speak well, think in a multidisciplinary way, and evaluate information critically. And they need to be punctual, dependable, and industrious.” (Gewertz, 2007).

The Framework for 21st Century Learning stated, “We believe schools must move beyond a focus on basic competency in core subjects to promoting understanding of academic content at much higher levels by weaving 21st century interdisciplinary themes into core subjects” (2007). 21st century skills bridge the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of students from the core academic areas to real life application.

“The primary aim of education is not to enable students to do well in school, but to help them do well in the lives they lead outside of the school.”

-Ray McNulty, ICLE
Iowa High School Summit, December 10, 2007

Descriptions of the new global reality are plentiful, and the need for new, 21st century skills in an increasingly complex environment is well documented. In one form or another, authors cite (1) the globalization of economics; (2) the explosion of scientific and technological knowledge; (3) the increasingly international dimensions of the issues we face, i.e. global warming and pandemic diseases; and (4) changing demographic as the major trends that have resulted in a future world much different from the one that many of us faced when we graduated from high school (Friedman, 2005 and Stewart, 2007). The trends are very clear that each Iowa students will need essential 21st century skills to lead satisfying lives in this current reality.

Descriptions of what constitute essential 21st century skills are plentiful as well. In the 2007 session, the Iowa Legislature established the Iowa 21st century framework as:
(1) civic literacy
(2) employability skills
(3) financial literacy
(4) health literacy
(5) technology literacy

Within this 21st century skill framework are the common strands of learning and innovation; communication, information, and technology; and, life and career skills. The development of the Iowa 21st century essential concepts and skills was a collaborative process engaging the expertise of p – 16 educators, business, and industry representatives. Sources used for this work included the 1991 SCANS report, What Work Requires of Schools, and Framework for 21st Century Learning, from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. The committee surveyed the literature and endeavored to bring together the common elements of these frameworks. The members have outlined the concepts, dispositions and habits of mind believed essential for success in the 21st century.

For a document that can’t get enough of the word “literacy,” it sure is poorly written (not to mention poorly proofread). I would like to keep people who think and write this way as far away from my kids’ education as possible. Maybe there are people who are impressed by this kind of pompous bureaucratese, and who swoon at the thought that “business and industry is providing a very clear message” about what “each Iowa students will need.” (It has citations, so it must be indisputably true!) For the rest of us, I’m afraid this is the closest thing we have to a Berlitz guide to this kind of edu-speak.
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What quadrant of the Rigor and Relevance Framework am I in?

Notice also, by the way, the helpful charts that are included in the Iowa Core. Here’s one from the section on “civic literacy” that I referred to in my last post (click to enlarge):

You can see how the chart helps teachers teach and students learn. So much better than what a teacher could come up with on his or her own. Interesting, too, how the standards manage to turn the discussion of individual rights into a discussion of compliance with school rules.

(Good luck figuring out what the quadrants mean, or how any purpose is served by presenting that information in the form of quadrants. If you can find the answer on the Department of Education’s website, you’ve got more spare time to kill than I do.)
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Meaningful coercion v. meaningless red tape

Sometimes it feels like a memo went out to supporters of the Common Core instructing them simply to deny that there are any downsides to the enterprise, regardless of how illogical or internally contradictory the denials are. “We’re going to have uniform standards in every state—but don’t worry, we still have local control.” “We’ve got hundreds of pages of detailed standards—but don’t worry, we’re not dictating a uniform curriculum.” “Every kid will have to meet these grade-by-grade standards—but don’t worry, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.”

As Karen W., and later the Washington Post, pointed out, supporters have begun to realize that the Common Core is not wildly popular (that it is, in Mike Huckabee’s words, “toxic”), so the new strategy is simply to rebrand it in some way that will distract people from what it actually is. (When the advice is, “Let’s keep doing it, but call it something less toxic,” you know you’re in trouble.) This is all just PR, and it undermines their credibility. The fact is, either the standards mean something—in which case they are clearly a big incursion on local control and teacher autonomy—or they don’t, in which case they are a pointless waste of time. The actual standards seem to fall into either one category or the other. The math standards are very detailed about what concepts must get covered from one year to the next; to say that they are not dictating curriculum is slicing the baloney very thin. By contrast, some of Iowa’s “21st Century Skills” standards are largely meaningless. It’s hard to imagine a civics class that wouldn’t arguably satisfy most of the standards in the section on “civic literacy.” So why not just pass a law saying that schools must teach civics?

Take a look, for example, at this portion (drawn pretty much at random) of the 21st Century Skills section of the Iowa Core for middle school:

Essential Concept and/or Skill: Understand the rights and responsibilities of each citizen and demonstrate the value of lifelong civic action.

• Understand rights, roles and status of the individual in relation to the general welfare.
• Understand issues regarding personal, political, and economic rights.
• Understand what is meant by the “scope and limits” of a right.
• Understand participation in civic and political life can help bring about the attainment of individual and public goals.
• Understand the functions of political leadership and why leadership is a vital necessity in a democracy.
• Understand the importance of voluntarism as a characteristic of American society.

Does this meaningfully constrain the social studies teacher? Is there any reason to believe that the kids in two different schools will come away with the same “skills” simply because their social studies teacher had to convince some administrator that his or her lesson plan satisfied these standards? Or do they just add a thick layer of red tape onto the job of teaching, with no meaningful benefit?

Do you believe that a standardized test can assess whether a teacher has complied with these standards and whether a student has met them?
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Eggs, basket

As others have pointed out, the Common Core is a national experiment that was not meaningfully field-tested in advance. What explains this desire to put an entire nation of eggs in one basket? It’s one thing to be confident in a policy proposal; it’s another thing to be so confident that you think no community in America should be allowed to try a different approach. What if the approach represented by the Common Core turns out to be a bad idea that has unintended consequences? Won’t we regret that we didn’t diversify our portfolio a bit?

Unintended consequences from education policy? Unimaginable!
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Yes, we all did it that way until a few years ago, but now it’s unthinkable!

In the face of the relentless drumbeat for the Common Core—forty-five states have now signed onto it—could we please take a moment to remember that for our entire history until just a few years ago, we all did things differently? What is it about education that makes it so susceptible to fads and trends, to arguments that we must all make large and sudden changes in what we’ve done before?

Could it have anything to do with how much money some people stand to make from supplying the “needs” associated with each new approach?
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The One True Way

You don’t have to be a local control extremist to oppose the Common Core standards. The alternative isn’t that every school board will somehow draft its own standards. The alternative is to allow the Common Core standards to be genuinely voluntary, and to allow other models to develop that districts can choose from. In all likelihood, a manageable number of competing alternatives would emerge which districts could choose and modify as they see fit. School boards wouldn’t be inventing their own approaches from scratch any more than they have to write their own textbooks from scratch.

Opposing the imposition of the Common Core just means recognizing that there is more than one way to think about how education works, and that the alternatives reflect value judgments that are exactly what school boards are elected to decide. Many people believe, quite defensibly, that a school system that pursues higher standardized test scores, regardless of what other values are sacrificed in the process, is not offering a good education. That is a permissible opinion. Many people think that the Common Core standards are not realistic or developmentally appropriate (especially in the early grades). That’s also a permissible opinion. Many have other objections to the Common Core – all permissible opinions to hold. Are we so sure that those people are wrong that we want to preclude any community from enacting policies based on those opinions?
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Why not Core Parenting Standards?

I think one impulse behind the Common Core is that education is a very complex science that only experts can understand. Pushing the Common Core, then, isn’t so much trying to shift power from local elected officials to state and federal elected officials; it’s trying to shift power from elected officials to “experts.” If educational issues hinge largely on value judgments, then it makes sense to bring the democratic process to bear on them. But if education is like quantum physics, then we just need to consult really smart physicists to find out the correct answers to our problems, and elected officials should just sign on and butt out.

Needless to say, I don’t think education is quantum physics. The ultimate questions in education are value questions about goals and priorities, which should be decided democratically. To the extent that there is expertise about how to reach the goals we choose, it rests largely with experienced classroom teachers, not with unelected bureaucrats and private groups. But the Common Core disagrees: it wants you to trust a small group of self-appointed experts to tell every community in America (and its teachers) what the right approach to education is.

(If you want to quickly dispel any illusions you might have about the superior expertise of our state education bureaucracy, you might take a look at some of the materials at the state Department of Education’s website (for example, here). This emperor has no clothes.)

Of course, an entire industry has been built on the idea that education can be trusted only to experts. But if education requires such specialized knowledge that communities full of ordinary people can’t be trusted to run it, isn’t the same even more true about parenting? Parenting is almost certainly more consequential than schooling. How has the human race survived without closer state intervention in everyday parenting? Shouldn’t the state require parents to demonstrate compliance with hundreds of pages of Parenting Standards? How will we ever compete in the global marketplace otherwise? The questions are obviously sarcastic, but I genuinely don’t know what the distinction is.
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More powerful ≠ smarter

Local control isn’t everything. Everybody knows that more centralized levels of government are better suited to deciding some issues than local governments are. It would make no sense for states and towns to conduct their own foreign policy. But there should be an articulable reason for giving policy-making power to the state or federal governments rather than to local governments. When it comes to imposing extensive and detailed curricular standards on local school districts, what is that reason?

One possible justification is that there is value in uniformity across districts and states; I’ll return to that in a later post. Is there any other justification? Does the state somehow have better access to “correct” thinking about educational practices than local governments have? I don’t see how.

One unspoken reason is: the state is smarter than local school districts are. Those locals (rhymes with “yokels”!) are just a bunch of amateurs who are bound to make bad choices. But what reason is there to believe that state officials and federal officials are more competent than local officials to decide anything, much less educational issues? They’re elected by the same voters, after all. They have fancier titles, and certainly they have more power. But where’s the evidence that they’re more competent?
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This isn't what “voluntary” means

I keep talking about the Common Core being a decision made at the federal level and foisted on states and localities. Advocates of Iowa’s version of the Common Core are careful to say that the Iowa Core was a state choice and that the adoption of the Common Core by individual states is purely “voluntary.” It’s true that the federal government cannot force the states to adopt the Common Core, but to say that its adoption is purely voluntary is disingenuous. The federal government made it clear that adopting the Common Core was a condition of getting waivers from No Child Left Behind and for qualifying for Race to the Top money. In other words, the federal government coerced the states into adopting the Common Core by threatening to withhold federal funds for education. Common Core supporters can defend that practice if they want, but they’re insulting our intelligence if they claim that it doesn’t undermine the values associated with federalism and local control.
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Fair-weather federalism

One thing that bothers me is how quickly people move from “I like Policy X” to “The federal government should impose Policy X on the whole nation.” Whether you like the Common Core standards themselves is a very different question from whether you think the federal or state governments should impose them on all school districts. In a year or two, a very different set of people might be in charge of the federal and state governments. They might propose a set of standards that you don’t like at all. If that happens, would a Common Core supporter suddenly become an advocate of local control? Shouldn’t one’s opinion about centralized policy-making be based on principle, rather than on who happens to be in power at any given moment?
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Strange bedfellows?

Again, there’s nothing very controversial about the idea that policy should be made locally unless there’s some good countervailing reason. That probably helps explain why there is opposition to the Common Core coming from both “liberals” and “conservatives.” (I dislike the labels, but I would have to be classified as much more in the “liberal” category myself.) Local control is certainly consistent with small-government conservatism, but it’s a caricature to suggest that liberals always favor centralization no matter what. Many liberals have concluded that the Common Core is an illiberal enterprise that promotes a narrow and misguided vision of education, one that disempowers and lowers the status of teachers, and one that assumes that what’s good for big business is what’s good for kids. (The Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce, for example, are some of the Common Core’s biggest promoters.) There is a lot of potential for liberals, conservatives, and even libertarians to find common ground against the Common Core. Authoritarians, though, will have a hard time finding much about the Common Core to dislike.
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Standards decided by whom?

What are the claimed benefits of the Common Core? As I understand it, they basically come down to two. First, adopting the Common Core will help ensure that kids are learning the things we want them all to learn. Second, adopting a “common” set of standards – that is, one that is uniform throughout the country – will make it easier for kids to adjust when they move from one school to another.

Starting with the first rationale: “We need standards to make sure kids learn what we want them to learn.” The first objection to this argument is that it does not respond at all to some of main reasons people oppose the Common Core. For many people, the problem is not the idea of standards, but the question of who gets to decide what they are. Traditionally, education has been the prototypical example of an issue that is best governed at the local level. There are good reasons why it should stay that way.

I start with the relatively uncontroversial proposition that government policies should be made at the local level unless there is a convincing reason to shift them to a more centralized authority (like the state or federal governments). There are at least three good reasons for this approach. First, it makes government more democratically accountable. Local school boards are elected solely to deal with education issues, so they are the entities best able to express community preferences and values on education. Presidents, members of Congress, governors, and even state legislators are elected to deal with a multitude of issues, and few such elections hinge on educational issues, so those elections are a much less useful way for voters to express their preferences about education.

Almost nobody changes his or her vote for President because of a candidate’s stand on education; I certainly don’t, and I’m pretty riled up about educational issues. So what reason is there to believe that federal education initiatives like the Common Core reflect what the public actually wants from its schools? And how democratically accountable are federal and state-wide actors for their choices about education? Has any federal or state office-holder ever been voted out of office because of his or her education policies?

Because state and federal officeholders’ elections don’t depend much on education issues, it is more likely that their policy choices will be driven by factors other than community preferences and values—for example, by well-funded interest groups with agendas that diverge from what the larger public values.

A second reason to favor local policy-making is that one size seldom fits all. Local governments are plainly in the best position to take local differences into account. They are also in a better position to accommodate variation in community values and preferences. Almost by definition, your own policy preferences are more likely to be reflected in the laws that govern you if you live in a decentralized system of government than if you live in a winner-take-all centralized system.

A third reason is that local variation allows good ideas to come to light that would not have otherwise—the “laboratories of democracy” idea. A related idea is that variation is a good hedge against risk—that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket.

There’s nothing very controversial about any of that. The first question, then, is whether there are good reasons to take the decision about educational standards out of the hands of the locally elected school boards and give it to the state, or to the federal government, instead. My only point in this post is that just saying “we need standards to make sure kids learn what we want them to learn” tells us nothing about which level of government should set standards. (The “we need uniformity” argument might; on that, more later.)
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The main reason I’m against the Common Core

The push for the Common Core rests on the proposition that there is a particular way of thinking about education that is so objectively correct that we should not allow any communities, anywhere in America, to choose a different approach. That would be bad enough, but it’s even worse when you see what that way of thinking is: one that assumes that all kids must learn the same things at the same time and has a limitless faith in the ability of standardized test scores to capture everything that we care about in our children’s school experience, without any unintended consequences. Proving that you have the One Right Approach is an awfully heavy burden, and this particular attempt doesn’t even come close.
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A Common Core micro-blogathon

The discussion I had on the panel show about the Common Core was interesting, but there were a lot of issues we did not have time to get to. I wanted to write a post here to raise some of those issues, but it turns out that a blog post isn’t large enough either. So I decided to hold a little micro-blogathon, with a stream of shorter posts, starting now. My possibly unrealistic goal is to put up one post every hour for the entire day, just to get these rambling thoughts out of my system. This will be blogging in its truest sense – off the cuff and thinking out loud, all subject to change, with comments and corrections welcome. (My apologies in advance to any commenters – it will probably be hard for me to take part in the comment threads while churning out additional posts.)

The Common Core is a detailed set of standards that is designed to govern what kids should learn—often on a year-by-year basis—throughout their K-12 education. It was developed by a national organization, and is being heavily pushed (though technically not mandated) by the federal government. It is designed to be accompanied by standardized tests that are much more extensive than the tests that have been used until now in Iowa.

Iowa has adopted a set of standards that is closely aligned with the Common Core (by participating in the Common Core, the state agrees not to vary them by more than 15%), but which supplements them with detailed standards in other areas not covered by the Common Core. The state of Iowa requires all local school districts to follow the Iowa Core. Iowa’s Department of Education has also been pushing for the adoption of the Core-aligned standardized tests, known as the Smarter Balanced Assessments, though the legislature has yet to impose them on school districts.

What could be the objections to such a plan? Stay tuned.
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Some debate about the Common Core

I recently got talked into appearing on a local Sunday morning TV show called “Ethical Perspectives on the News,” which was hosting a discussion of the Common Core standards. The other guests on the show were Cedar Rapids School Superintendent Dave Benson and Tania Johnson, a Cedar Rapids kindergarten teacher who was named Iowa’s 2013 Teacher of the Year. Benson and Johnson are both supportive of Iowa’s version of the Common Core, and I think the station asked me to join the group to get another view and also for the sake of including a parent on the panel. I don’t know how well I did in that role, and we could barely scrape the surface of the topic in the half hour that we had, but I enjoyed myself more than I expected to (maybe too much!). The show was hosted by Kirkwood Community College Philosophy Professor Scott Samuelson, known here for his music blog. In case you’re interested, the show runs this Sunday, February 9, at 11 a.m. on KCRG (local channel 9).

I hope to post a few more thoughts about the Common Core in the meantime.
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Guest post: Legislators considering Montessori bill

Our guest blogger is Karen Woltman, a local Montessori proponent and co-founder of the Montessori Elementary School Steering Committee. Karen attended the Montessori School of Iowa City and her children have attended the Montessori Children's Garden in North Liberty. You can read more about the effort to start a public Montessori School in the Iowa City area here.

A bill was filed this week in the Iowa House relating to Montessori programs. If passed, HF 2045 would accomplish four things: 1) have DHS adopt rules for standards and procedures for approval of Montessori training organizations, 2) have the DE add a Montessori accrediting agency to the approved list of independent accrediting agencies for nonpublic schools, 3) have the BOEE adopt criteria for a Montessori endorsement, and 4) have the BOEE create an option for nontraditional preparation for the Montessori endorsement.

Montessori has been part of Iowa's education landscape for over fifty years, with Montessori programs located in communities across the state from Council Bluffs to Davenport and Dubuque. The Iowa City area alone boasts four Montessori programs serving approximately two hundred and sixty students in preschool classrooms each year.

Certified Montessori teachers typically have a bachelor's degree prior to beginning Montessori teacher training, and are fully trained in Montessori philosophy, methods, materials, curriculum, and child development.

It is hoped that the provisions of HF 2045 will support the efforts of existing private and public Montessori schools to continue to provide high-quality Montessori programs and support the creation of new high-quality private or public Montessori programs by recognizing relevant, high-quality Montessori training programs and a Montessori accrediting agency.

If you support Montessori education, please take a few minutes to e-mail your state representative and senator and ask them to support HF 2045. If you are uncertain who your legislators are, you can find them here. The Iowa Senate members and e-mail addresses can be found here, and the Iowa House members and e-mail addresses can be found here.

Johnson County is represented by:

Sen. Joe Bolkcom Joe.Bolkcom@legis.iowa.gov
Sen. Robert Dvorsky Robert.Dvorsky@legis.iowa.gov
Sen. Sandra Greiner Sandra.Greiner@legis.iowa.gov
Rep. Dave Jacoby David.Jacoby@legis.iowa.gov
Rep. Bobby Kaufmann Bobby.Kaufmann@legis.iowa.gov
Rep. Vicki Lensing Vicki.Lensing@legis.iowa.gov
Rep. Mary Mascher Mary.Mascher@legis.iowa.gov
Rep. Sally Stutsman Sally.Stutsman@legis.iowa.gov
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MLK and the ICCSD

The school district here made a well-intentioned but poorly vetted decision to hold school on Martin Luther King Day this year, on the theory that the holiday would be more meaningful for kids if it were accompanied by a day of school programming on King. The many people who protested the decision at last month’s school board meetings made more good arguments than I can repeat here. It seems a particularly bad idea to single out MLK Day, of all holidays, for different treatment, especially in a way that makes it seem like, well, not a holiday. Nobody asks whether Labor Day or Memorial Day might be more educational if the kids went to school.

Many parents explained that they would prefer their children to spend the day in the company of family or at community- or church-sponsored activities. I don’t blame people for wondering whether the school district’s celebration of the day might be less than ideal. Of all holidays, Martin Luther King Day seems like a particularly bad fit for school.

One problem for the school district is that King stood for something: that there was political, philosophical, and religious content to his message. Fifty years later, there is still great disagreement in America about what racial justice means and entails. The school district can’t (and shouldn’t) tell kids what opinions to hold on politically charged issues. As a result, the district is likely to confine its celebration of King to his role in history fifty years ago, rather than to his relevance today, or to limit itself to high-level generalities (civil rights are important; all people are equal under the law) or to some vague notion of “service.” A public school is also poorly situated to discuss the role of Christianity in King’s life, which would be central to any understanding of him. In other words, any school celebration of King is likely to be impaired by institutional constraints.

It doesn’t help that schools are particularly authoritarian institutions, while King’s mission required him to confront authority at every turn. It would be easier for the district to teach about King if it had a history (on the other 179 school days) of emphasizing the importance of individual conscience rather than reflexive obedience to authority, and of welcoming dissent and criticism rather than trying to quash it. It also doesn’t help that the district has been accused of disciplining minority kids, and referring them to special education, at disproportionate rates. At the same meeting at which the board discussed MLK Day, it discussed its plan to require IDs and background checks of parents who want to enter their kids’ schools. (After a lot of people objected, the board decided to revisit the plan at a future meeting, but the central administration is apparently still pushing for it.) It’s hard not to conclude: School district, teach thyself.

So many people want to see our schools as agents for transforming society that it’s easy to forget that the school system is a creature of society and likely to embody as many of its faults as its virtues. An enormous, bureaucratic, political institution is much more apt to reproduce the status quo than to transform it. Trying to urge humane values on school officials is a worthwhile effort, and I certainly don’t think it’s futile. But the state will probably never be the ideal candidate for teaching kids about political protest, civil disobedience, or the rights of the individual against the state; the conflict of interest is too great, and the likelihood of mixed messages high. That’s another good reason not to make kids spend Martin Luther King Day in school.
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A thank-you to Southeast Junior High

From my friend Doris, a frequent commenter here:

For your blog if you can find a place to post it:

Dear Chris,

More than once on this blog you have acknowledged, to your credit, that because you don’t have experience raising special needs children, some of the concerns you raise may not adequately reflect the experiences of families that do have non-typical learners. Ours is such a family. As we are not participants in organized religion, my approach to giving thanks tends to fall on the secular side. And so here, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to use your blog as a venue for offering some public thanks to all the wonderful faculty and staff at South East Junior High who have made this school year a very good one indeed for our two children—and particularly our child with special needs. Like you, I make no claim that our experience is representative of the experience of other South East families. But from the first time we went over to South East last spring, to get the ball rolling on the process of shifting our children from a small group homeschool program into 7th and 8th grade, respectively, we’ve been treated with courtesy and good cheer by a variety of people who have gone out of their way to help us and our children make it work. In more than one comment on your blog I have criticized a “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” driven attitude that can result in a quite miserable educational experience for children who, for whatever reason, struggle to keep up with an unrealistic pace. I’m not saying that South East is perfect, but in our experience thus far the “vibe” we have been getting is that, like us, they think the best approach is to treat our special needs child as a capable and complicated individual (albeit one with endearing foibles) and to operate with a flexible attitude toward the process of figuring out which accommodations she needs to help her learn and thrive. It’s been good, basically—better than we would have thought possible going in. I have no idea what North West and North Central are like—fine schools, presumably—but so far I’d have no reservations recommending South East to parents of special needs learners in search of a local public middle school. Here, too, I’d like in particular to thank our child’s South East LRE teacher, Mr. Josh Chambers, for all his help this fall. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve dashed off an email about some problem that has cropped up, and typically by the next day he has written back to let us know he has handled things.

Ultimately I guess what I am trying to say is that they teachers and staff over there actually seem to like our special needs child just as she is, and they seem committed to helping her succeed in her own way, not in a way mandated by federal law.

Thanks, too, to you, Chris, for all the work you put into running this extraordinarily helpful blog. I marvel at your dedication and value all the insight I’ve gained.

Doris

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Chadek’s Field

View of City High, looking east. Chadek’s Field is on the right.
(Click to enlarge.)

One of the main reasons offered for closing Hoover School is that City High needs the land to expand. Specifically, the planned addition to City may displace an outdoor athletic facility such as the tennis courts or softball field, and some would prefer that City not have athletic facilities off-site (such as at Mercer Park, a mile and half away). Others have argued that City will need even more land eventually, though no one has specified why. The district has asserted that “We can’t expand City without this,” and that “Adding Hoover alone is not even really enough.” Closing Hoover and rebuilding its capacity elsewhere may seem like a big expense, the argument goes, but it’s worth it to enlarge the City property for these unspecified future uses.

How can we take those arguments seriously, when the school board is doing nothing to explore the purchase of Chadek’s Field—which is by far the cheapest way to expand City’s footprint?

Chadek’s Field is the informal name for a five-acre undeveloped parcel that sits just two blocks south of the City High property. It is roughly the same size as the Hoover lot. The Chadek family has been looking into selling the property. The neighborhood would prefer that it not be developed with housing, but that it remain a green space, and the Chadek family (at least one of whom lives in the neighborhood) has tried to accommodate that preference, despite getting other offers. They have explored selling the parcel to the city for use as a park. At one point, the Chadeks were seeking $560,000 for the property, and there was a proposal that the city would chip in half the amount, with the remainder being raised privately. But the city was unable to agree on the price, and it’s unclear where that proposal now stands.

Compared to closing Hoover, which will cost over ten million dollars, buying Chadek’s field would be very cheap, and even more so if it were part of a joint venture with the city. It would be one of the least expensive items in the district’s long-term plan. It would be far less controversial than the district’s plan to expand Mann Elementary by 76%, which also depends on negotiations with the city. And it would be cheaper than buying up other surrounding properties, since the Field has no houses on it.

City High’s tennis courts would take up less than a quarter of the Chadek property; the same is true of its softball field. If the district were to buy Chadek’s Field, the neighborhood would get its green space, City High would get room for its athletic fields, Hoover could stay open, the Chadeks would get their sale, and the district could save millions of dollars by not having to rebuild Hoover’s capacity somewhere else.

Even if the district does close Hoover, shouldn’t it be working to acquire this property? Under the district’s own logic, City will always need more land. It could buy eight whole blocks around Chadek’s and still not be as large as West or the new high school.

The opportunity to buy this property won’t last forever. How can the district ask the voters for millions to close Hoover when it is not pursuing this inexpensive, neighborhood-friendly way to expand City?
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Imperfect storm

At last week’s school board work session, board chair Sally Hoelscher explained that there was no one big reason to close Hoover School, but rather a “perfect storm of multiple reasons.” But Hoelscher and the board majority cited only three such reasons: (1) Hoover needs a lot of renovation work, (2) City High “needs” the land, and (3) operational costs will be too high if an elementary school is not closed.

It is hard to see how these reasons, even taken together, justify closing Hoover. All of the older schools need a lot of renovation; that was one of the main reasons the voters passed the Revenue Purpose Statement in February. The estimated cost of renovating Hoover ($5.1 million) is comparable to what the district is spending to renovate several other schools. The renovations to Twain, for example, were estimated at $5.8 million; to Longfellow, $5 million; to Mann, $4.8 million; Shimek, Lucas, and Lincoln, $4.1 million each. (Those figures don’t include the cost of planned classroom additions.) And of course it is far cheaper to renovate Hoover than to tear it down and rebuild its capacity elsewhere, which will cost over ten million dollars.

As for City High’s “need” for the land, it has come down, at best, simply to the difference between keeping some outdoor athletic spaces—tennis courts and/or a softball field—on-site rather than off-site. (Or, at worst, to the desire for more parking for City.) And there are opportunities to keep those fields only two blocks from City, at a cost far lower than closing Hoover, but the district hasn’t even explored them. Michael Tilley discusses that trade-off more here.

What about operational cost? The pro-closure board members would have us believe that the operating cost of keeping our current schools open is unsustainable, that the number of schools that must be closed is exactly one, and that Hoover is the logical choice to close. But in fact, no operational cost argument can justify singling Hoover out for closure, since it is not a particularly small school. Its 304-seat capacity (according to the consultants) is significantly larger than that of Longfellow (258), Twain (252), Shimek (239), Mann (237), Hills (189), and Lincoln (187). Hoover will be larger than some of those schools even after those schools get their planned additions.

Moreover, no one has identified the operational cost of keeping Hoover, or any particular school, open. We’re told that the district puts the annual cost of operating one additional school at $500,000, but that’s not the question. The district seems determined not to recognize that if Hoover stays open, we don’t need to build as much new capacity elsewhere. So the cost of operating Hoover has to be offset by the cost of operating the new buildings constructed to house 304 kids. The plan is to expand Mann and Longfellow by roughly that amount. Won’t those additions have heating and air conditioning costs? Electricity costs? Water and sewage? Maintenance? An accurate cost calculation would also have to account for any increase in busing caused by the closure of Hoover. Since Hoover runs no gen-ed buses (except the one for SINA transfers), that number can move in only one direction. As it stands, the voters are being asked to spend over ten million dollars to close a school for the sake of saving a much smaller, unspecified amount in annual operating costs—and without any good reason to single out that particular school.

This is hardly a “perfect storm” that can justify closing an elementary school. Is there any reason to think the public has been persuaded by the board majority’s arguments?
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My glass is half empty, so yours should be too

If you aren’t reading Michael Tilley’s blog, you’re missing some of the best commentary out there on the facilities plan and other local school issues. Today he disputes the argument that equity requires all three high schools to have equal athletic and parking facilities, even if there is no connection to benefiting the students who are least well off, and even if it comes at the cost of closing a neighborhood elementary school, and even if we have to make other high schools’ facilities worse to achieve it (as I saw argued today on Facebook).

Michael is right that equalization at any cost is “equity run amok.” Moreover, it never seems to occur to some of City High’s “supporters” that City might actually have some advantages over West High and over the future new high school, and that some of those advantages might be related to its physical surroundings. After all, thousands of people freely choose to live in the area around City—because they like it. I live right next to City, and I love the neighborhoods around it. I like that City is easily walkable for so many people. I like its proximity to downtown. I like that City has an elementary school right next door. I like that the junior high is easily walkable from City. I’m not bothered by the fact that a few of City’s athletic facilities are located near the junior high; I think that has benefits for the neighborhood, too.

This is nothing against the west side or the North Corridor. Different people choose different things. But I chose the east side because I like it. If I were at West, I’d be envious of some of the things City has. What I don’t get is why some of City’s supporters are determined to see every difference between the two as a badge of inferiority. Why are they so sure that the balance of advantages and disadvantages always tips in West’s favor? And how does that stance help City High?
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Election activism turns out to be meaningful

When the Save Hoover group publicized which school board candidates supported keeping Hoover open, some people told us that we were being naive, that the candidates would just tell us what we wanted to hear and then forget about us after the election. We were especially warned not to trust the west-side candidates, Tuyet Dorau and Chris Lynch; west-siders would never pursue the Hoover issue once elected.

At tonight’s school board work session, two board members pushed for a discussion of the Hoover closure: Tuyet Dorau and Chris Lynch. Dorau said that the board should be concerned that the Hoover closure does not have community buy-in, especially since the district needs public support to pass the necessary bond. She said that the closure will cause families to flee the neighborhood. She recognized that the closure costs a lot of money that could be used for better purposes. Lynch said that the community has made it clear that the board’s rationale for the closure isn’t sufficient. He said that the board should be more concerned with building community buy-in for the bond vote. He suggested putting the closure on hold and moving forward with the rest of the plan.

Brian Kirschling, the third candidate elected this year, was sympathetic to concerns about the process that led to the closure. He told me after the meeting that aspects of the closure did not meet his criteria for acceptable school closures. But he said that he did not think that the December 10 meeting was the right occasion to reconsider the closure, since the issue at that meeting is whether to adopt the phasing plan, not whether to change the master plan itself.

I don’t mean to suggest that Lynch and Dorau are in complete agreement with the Save Hoover group, and I’m not commenting at all on their approach to other issues. And I’m not writing off the possibility that Kirschling could vote to keep Hoover open at some point in the future. All I’m saying is that the new board members acted exactly as you might have predicted from their statements during the campaign. When voters succeed in getting candidates to take positions on specific issues, those statements mean something. Candidates are unlikely to casually toss them aside at the first opportunity, and couldn’t do so without paying a price.

The work session made it clear that a majority of the board—Marla Swesey, Sally Hoelscher, Jeff McGinness, and Patti Fields—is unwilling to reverse the decision to close Hoover. Those board members are the four whose seats come up for election two years from now. Given the outcome of this recent board election, I’m very encouraged about the prospects for change in the next one. Let the 2015 campaign begin!
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How to trivialize equity

“No building left behind” should be our school district’s policy, according to Jean Jordison’s guest opinion in yesterday’s Press-Citizen. Jordison argues that the district should not build new schools without simultaneously bringing older buildings up to the standard of the new ones. “I find it hard to accept any plan that puts an older facility ‘on hold,’” she writes.

Nowhere does the essay mention that Jordison herself has been a prominent advocate for closing Hoover Elementary.

Her failure to mention that fact, or to mention Hoover anywhere in the article, parallels the approach of most of the school board. At last week’s board meeting, speaker after speaker objected to closing Hoover, but when the board deliberated, it was as if none of those speakers even existed. Five of the seven board members did not even utter the word “Hoover.” When Tuyet Dorau said that the board members need to be honest with themselves and the public about their reason for closing Hoover, no board member responded. (At another point, Chris Lynch did mention that he had concerns about Hoover; maybe he will raise them when the discussion continues at the next meeting.)

The board members did start to discuss the challenge of getting the public to approve a $120 million bond, however. Message to the public: “We won’t respond at all to your concerns and your arguments, but we do want your money.” Not a great slogan for a bond campaign.

I believe that Jordison and the board members are so silent on the topic of Hoover because they know that the arguments for the closure are unconvincing. Worse, the closure trivializes the concern for equity that both Jordison and the board have made their top priority. The superintendent has made clear that the Hoover property will be used, at best, to relocate athletic fields displaced by the City High addition. The only equity goal achieved by the closure is to ensure that City students won’t have to walk farther to their softball field or tennis courts than students at the other high schools do. For this, the board wants to close an elementary school and spend over ten million dollars to rebuild its capacity elsewhere. (I wonder if even this tennis court cost ten million dollars.)

Our district has some genuine disparities among its schools that shout out to be addressed—for example, the concentration of kids from low-income families into just a few elementary attendance areas. It’s going to be hard enough to get the public to address those concerns, through both approval of a bond and acceptance of a redistricting plan. Jordison and the board members just make that task harder, and undermine their own credibility on the issue, by associating those real concerns with “distance-to-tennis-courts equity.” No wonder they don’t want to talk about it.
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Why pick this battle?

There are now 635 signatures on the petition to keep Hoover and all the schools open. The petition not to use Hoover as a swing school, which was circulated primarily to current Hoover parents, has 285 signatures. Those petitions started only two weeks ago, and new signatures continue to come in on both. (You can sign them here and here.)

In the world of local school governance, six hundred people is a lot of people. The Revenue Purpose Statement, for example, passed by only 733 votes this past February. I remain mystified why the school board would pick this particular battle. There is so much they hope to accomplish over the next ten years—not only on facilities, but also on redistricting and pursuing the diversity goals—and they can’t possibly do it without public support. Ignoring public sentiment about school closings will just make their other, far more important goals harder to achieve.

Some board members have expressed a sense of urgency about finally “doing something.” But if they really want to make changes, shouldn’t they want those changes to be sustainable? If they “do something” without any regard to public buy-in, only to find their changes undone by the voters in future elections, they will have accomplished nothing but wasting several years. If they want lasting change, how many hundreds of people can they afford to alienate?
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Reminder: Closing Hoover costs over ten million dollars

One of the district’s main goals, in its facilities planning process, was to address overcrowding in its schools, many of which (including Hoover) currently have so many kids that they need temporary classrooms. Yet the school board ultimately decided to make closing Hoover part of its plan. Closing a school, of course, makes it harder to address overcrowding. Because it is closing Hoover, the board needs to build that much more capacity elsewhere. Its plan, for example, builds additions at Longfellow and Mann elementaries that together cost almost $16 million – over and above the cost of the renovations and air conditioning that everyone agrees those schools should get. Even if you discount the $3.5 million that it would cost to renovate Hoover if it were kept open, the closure is costing roughly $12 million—while adding no new capacity at all.

That twelve million dollars could be spent on real needs—for example, on projects that actually add elementary capacity. (Or it could be saved entirely.)

It costs twelve million dollars, it adds no capacity, it will delay and endanger other projects in the plan, it hurts the surrounding neighborhood, it violates the expectations raised by the Revenue Purpose Statement vote and the clear public preferences expressed at the community workshops, it makes it harder to pass the necessary bond, and it closes a school that is ideally located to meet the district’s diversity goals without running a single bus. Why does anyone think this closure is a good idea?
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Will the school board vote to move forward with the Hoover closure?

At its meeting tomorrow (Tuesday) night, the school board will discuss—and possibly vote on—the superintendent’s proposed time line for the district’s facilities plan. The proposal would close Hoover Elementary as of 2019. If the board approves the plan, it would be taking one more step toward making the closure a reality (though it would still be years off and could change).

The proposed time line was made public four days ago. There was a school board “listening post” on the issue tonight, but only one board member (Tuyet Dorau) was there to listen. I was surprised to hear that the board might vote on the plan at tomorrow’s meeting; given the scale of the plan, the number of issues involved, and the fact that the plan depends on public approval of a $120 million bond, I’d expect the board members to give the plan a particularly careful vetting and to make more of an effort to ensure public buy-in. But they might; we’ll see.

If the board does vote on the proposal, tomorrow could be the most important night for Hoover until the 2015 board election, and of course a very important night for many other issues as well. If you’re local and feel strongly about the plan, come to the meeting and speak up. Please also consider signing the petition to ask the board to keep all our schools open, and the separate petition to ask the board to reconsider using Hoover as a transitional space (“swing school”) for other schools when they are being renovated.

The meeting is at 6:00, Tuesday, November 12, at the Educational Services Center, 1725 North Dodge Street, Iowa City.
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Two petitions on the facilities plan

The Save Hoover group has started two petitions about the facilities plan. The first asks the board to keep all our schools, including Hoover, open. The second asks the board to reconsider using Hoover as the transitional space (“swing school”) for other schools when they are being renovated. You can read and sign them by following those links.

The superintendent is now saying that he will present an amended version of the plan that does not use Hoover as a swing school and that returns to the board’s original plan of closing Hoover no earlier than 2017-18. That’s a big improvement over the superintendent’s initial proposal (which I described here), and a nice demonstration of the fact that policies can change if enough people speak up about them. But the superintendent says that the amended plan is a work in progress that could change; I wonder how many more “amended versions” we will see. The more people who sign the petitions or contact the school board about the issue, the more likely the district will reconsider the proposal.

A quick recap of some of the reasons to sign the petitions is available here.
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Superintendent’s proposal would unfairly burden Hoover kids

This is a letter I emailed to the school board today.

Dear Board Members,

The superintendent’s facilities and redistricting time lines are a lot of information, and it will take a while to process it all, but I wanted to raise some immediate concerns about the treatment of Hoover kids under his proposal.

1. The proposal would close Hoover before there is any available space to put Hoover’s kids. Although Hoover’s attendance area will be eliminated at the end of 2015-16, the redistricting time line does not indicate which schools will be redistricted to take in Hoover’s students. It states that Hoover is the only school being rezoned in 2016 – but the Hoover kids have to go somewhere.

The most likely candidates – Longfellow, Lemme, Lucas, and Mann – will not have the capacity to accommodate Hoover’s kids. Mann is projected to be 18% overcrowded, and Lucas to be 24% overcrowded, at that time. Longfellow and Lemme will have lost some students to the new southeast elementary school, but will still be unable to accommodate 350 students from Hoover without being significantly over capacity.

2. The proposal would use Hoover as a swing school for school populations that are much larger than Hoover’s capacity. Hoover’s capacity is 304, but Lucas is projected to have 471 students when it uses Hoover in 2016, and will have even more if it has absorbed some of Hoover’s enrollment. Longfellow will also have way more than 304 students when it would be using Hoover as a swing school in 2017, since it will presumably have absorbed much of Hoover.

The enrollments at Shimek, Lincoln, and Mann are small enough to fit into Hoover’s space – but they are also small enough that two of them could fit simultaneously into the new 500-student elementary school (if they could be renovated simultaneously). The initial plan to use the new elementary as a swing school makes more sense than using Hoover.

3. Under the proposal, Hoover families would have to go through redistricting three times in five years – first when the school closes in 2016, then when east side schools are redistricted again in 2018, then when they are redistricted again in 2020.

4. In sum, the proposal takes Hoover kids, moves them to schools that are even more overcrowded, then, in many cases, moves them back into an overcrowded Hoover as a swing school, then makes them go through redistricting again not once, but twice.

The difficulty of closing Hoover during a time of overcrowding is one of many reasons the board should reconsider the closure. The closure is bad for the ICCSD, which needs Hoover’s capacity, and the proposed treatment of Hoover’s kids afterward just compounds the injury.

Thanks for your consideration..

Update on the facilities time line

The superintendent presented his proposed time line for the projects in the facilities master plan tonight. Until it is approved by the board, it remains just a proposal. The board is scheduled to consider and possibly vote on the plan at its November 12 meeting.

The full presentation is here. There is much more in the plan than I can possibly absorb tonight, but here are a few quick thoughts.

1. The superintendent proposed that Hoover’s attendance area be eliminated as of the fall of 2016 – a year sooner than the board had permitted. As far as I could tell, this was the only aspect of his entire proposal that departed from what the board approved in July (other than an inadvertent omission of an elementary school addition). Hoover would then be used for five years as a “swing school” to accommodate students from elsewhere whose schools were being renovated. Then, after the 2020-21 year, it would be torn down.

2. Under the superintendent’s proposal, the district would ask voters to approve a $119 million bond in 2017 – as I understand it, all at once. This means Hoover’s attendance area would already have been eliminated before we know whether voters will approve the bond that will fund the new capacity. As a strategy for preventing the Hoover closure from being an issue in the bond vote, this is understandable (though cynical). But if the bond is not approved, the district may not be able to build the capacity it is counting on to make up for the loss of Hoover, and may wish that it had kept Hoover open. This is a good reason to put off the closure until after the bond vote, rather than accelerate it.

3. The superintendent’s proposal eliminates Hoover’s attendance area as of 2016, but does not redraw any other school’s attendance areas at that time. How is that possible? The Hoover kids won’t just disappear.

4. The board’s initial plan was to use the newly built elementary school as the swing school, rather than Hoover. The superintendent proposed to use Hoover instead, since it is closer in size to the schools that need to be “swung.” I don’t understand that: under the plan, Longfellow and Mann will both be over 400 students; Lucas will hold 381, and Shimek will hold 339. The district claims that Hoover has a capacity of 304. How is it a suitable swing school for those schools?

If the answer is that those schools won’t be resized until after their stay at the swing school, why not, and how is that possible? Again, the 350+ Hoover kids will have to go somewhere, and will almost certainly be going to some of those schools, pushing up the number of kids who would then have to use the swing school.

5. How many times will Hoover kids be redistricted? Under this proposal, the first time would be in 2016. Just two years later, the schools where they will probably end up – Longfellow, Lemme, Mann, and Lucas, as well as Shimek – will be redistricted again. Two years after that, those same schools will be redistricted again! On top of that, some Hoover kids will have to move in and out of a swing school during that time. Under this proposal, woe to the kindergartner who starts Hoover next year.

6. The City High addition – which we were told repeatedly couldn’t happen without the closure of Hoover – would begin construction in 2015 and be completed by 2021. In other words, the entire addition would be built while Hoover is still up and running as a swing school. The superintendent said that this would be very uncomfortable until City could finally get the Hoover property – but when asked how the Hoover property would be used as a result of the addition, he said he didn’t know. The continued evasion on that question becomes more and more glaring as the rest of the plan is fleshed out in such fine detail.

7. We’re told, for the first time, that Hoover’s use as a swing school will cost $6.5 million – a number not included in the master plan.

8. The superintendent said that the Mann addition was scheduled relatively late to give the district more time to negotiate with the city over possibly expanding Mann’s (very small) lot. I assume this would mean taking some of North Market Park for the school. This strikes me as a potentially controversial proposal: what if it there’s no deal? By that time, the superintendent’s plan would already have closed Hoover; if Mann can’t be expanded, we’ll be short of capacity again.

9. My main reaction is that it would make more sense to find out whether the public will approve the necessary bonds for new capacity before discontinuing a school, and before starting any large projects that will need bonds to be completed; otherwise the district is counting its chickens before they’re hatched. It’s also just dismissive of the public to wait until the plan has already been half-executed before asking for approval of the bonds. Rather than risk trying to convince the public that the plan is a good one, the superintendent wants to wait until the public is over a barrel, with projects half-completed, and then ask for the money. Disappointing, though not surprising.


Not much time to blog for a week or two, but I’m looking forward to others’ commentary on the plan – will try to post links in the comments here.
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Anticipating the facilities time line

At tonight’s school board work session, the superintendent will reveal his proposed time line for projects in the facilities master plan. I’m very curious to see how he balances all the competing goals, and especially to see how he handles the planned closure of Hoover Elementary.

Under the master plan, Hoover can’t close before 2017-18. But it’s hard to see how it could close even that soon. The district has projected that the east side will be about 600 kids overcrowded by 2017-18 unless new capacity is built. If Hoover were to close that year, that number would rise to about 900. If Longfellow or Mann is out of operation for a year (as planned) due to renovations, that number would rise to about 1150. Will the district really have 900 or 1150 new elementary seats up and running – on the east side alone – within four years? If not, closing Hoover would only worsen the overcrowding problem.

And of course there are many other projects in the plan competing for priority in the time line. Some of the most immediate need for new capacity is in the North Corridor, to alleviate existing overcrowding at Penn. The plan also contains improvements (air conditioning!) at existing schools, and improvements and new capacity at the junior high and high school levels, including a new high school. Unless we’re about to enter into an unprecedented frenzy of construction and renovation, it’s hard to see how the district could have 900 or 1150 new elementary seats on the east side within four years. And why should it, when Hoover is available and can house at least three hundred students?

But, from this school district, one expects the unexpected. We’ll see . . .
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Sixty more years!

Over at Save Hoover, read why there are good reasons to think that the Hoover closure isn’t a “done deal.”.

Require bonds for the new capacity, not the improvements

Next week, the superintendent will propose a time line for the projects in the facilities master plan. I’m certainly curious to see which projects he will recommend to go first, and which will have to wait. But what I’m really curious to know (and I don’t know if we’ll find this out next week) is which projects will require new bonds.

By all accounts, the district is about $100 million short of what it would need to fund its entire long-term facilities plan. As a result, many of the projects will require bonds. Those bonds will need to get 60% approval at the polls – never a sure bet, as the proponents of the county justice center can attest.

I hope the district will state its criteria for deciding which projects will proceed with existing funds and which can’t happen without bonds. It’s a complex issue, but in my view, basic improvements to existing buildings – such as air conditioning, overdue maintenance, accessibility renovations, and the construction of gyms/cafeterias/multipurpose rooms – should not require bond votes. It makes more sense to require bonds for some of the new capacity construction, especially to the extent that those projects are controversial and particularly expensive.

By my (very rough) calculations, the district plans to spend about $104 million on improvements, and about $148 million on building new capacity. Some of the new capacity is urgently needed; it might make sense, for example, to go ahead with building the addition at Penn and a new east side elementary without first seeking a bond vote. But the capacity projects that are more expensive, more controversial, and less immediately necessary should be the ones that are subject to bonding.

As for the time line, I’d take the same approach: The improvements are needed now, and in many cases are years overdue. Much of the new capacity is not.

I can’t deny that my criteria would help the case for keeping Hoover open. Hoover can’t close until there’s enough new capacity to relieve overcrowding and absorb the almost four hundred kids from Hoover. If any of the bonds for new elementary capacity get voted down, Hoover will have a new lease on life. But there’s good reason the closure should hinge on bond votes: it’s an expensive luxury compared to the urgently needed projects in the plan. In any event, their effect on Hoover aside, I can’t think of any fairer set of criteria.

The board members have some hard choices to make – partly because previous boards avoided making them – and I don’t envy them. As I understand it, even the improvements alone would have to be spread out over time, because the money is not available all at once. There’s no perfect answer. I’d love to know other people’s thoughts about how the time line should proceed and which projects should need bonds. Post a comment!
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Don’t fence me in

The fence posts in the picture above appeared suddenly a week or so ago, surprising the Hoover School staff and students. Apparently the district is determined to fence in the last remaining opening to Hoover’s grounds, as part of its “safety and security enhancements.”

Never mind that sixty years have gone by during which the district never thought we needed a fence there. Never mind that the plan is to leave the gates unlocked at all times, which would seem to defeat much of the purpose. Never mind whether the Hoover community wants the fence. (No one asked.)

The hill on the east side of the fence has been the local sledding hill for as long as anyone can remember. The fence will make it hard to sled on much of the hill. The principal has asked the district if anything can be done to preserve the sledding; word has it that the district might move the fence back a bit. Of course, if the school closes as planned, the sledding hill may be history anyway, especially if the land is used as a parking lot.

“It looks like a prison,” one kid said after last year’s new fence went up. Yes, it does.
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Divisive plan is divisive

This is an email I sent to the board tonight in response to the email sent by a parent from the Mann attendance area that I wrote about here.

Dear Directors and Superintendent Murley,

I was forwarded a copy of the email [a district parent] recently sent to the board. I am the person who said that I had yet to hear of anyone in the Mann neighborhood who wanted to dramatically increase the number of kids the school would hold, and now I can no longer say that. But although [that parent] asserts that many others agree with her, neither I nor the district has any way to know whether her opinions are representative of people in that neighborhood and attendance area. I wonder whether the district has any plan to assess how Mann’s families and neighbors feel about enlarging that building to hold 76% more kids.

I notice that [the parent] is a teacher at City High. I want all of our teachers to be able to speak their minds freely on school issues. I do wonder, though, if teachers who don’t agree with the closure of Hoover would feel as comfortable expressing their opinions openly. From what I hear about the teachers at Hoover, the answer is no. I wish that were not the case.

In her email, [the parent] wrote that “it is imperative for individuals not to attack other schools.” I’m puzzled by that comment. If a Hoover parent argues that we should keep all the schools open and cut back on additions, that’s an attack, but if Mann or City High parents argue that Hoover should be closed so their schools can have new additions, that’s not? I think it’s a better idea not to see substantive arguments about the merits of the long-term plan as attacks on anyone.

In any event, if families at different schools feel that they have been pitted against each other, it is because of the board’s choices. The board had the option of keeping its existing schools open and planning its new construction accordingly. That was the option that the public supported at the community workshops. Instead, it has divided the district against itself at a time when it’s about to embark on even more controversial decisions. I believe that an approach that is more responsive to public input would better serve the district.

My letter in reply to [the parent] is here.

Thanks for your consideration.
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Should Hoover be closed so Mann and Longfellow can become dramatically larger?

Today I heard via email of a parent at Mann School who supports the proposal to increase the capacity of that school by 76%, so I can no longer make the statement I made last night that I have yet to hear of people in the Mann community who support the addition. I continue to question how widespread that sentiment is, though, especially if people know that the additions are coming at the expense of closing a school elsewhere. This particular Mann parent had written to the school board last night to express her disagreement with me, stating that “it is imperative that individuals not attack other schools.” That prompted this response from me:

I’m the person who spoke at the meeting last night and said that I haven’t heard families from the Mann and Longfellow neighborhoods and attendance areas say that they wanted to dramatically increase the number of kids at those schools (as opposed to just getting needed renovations like air conditioning and multi-purpose rooms).

I appreciate hearing about someone in Mann’s attendance area who wants the addition. But I wanted to get in touch with you just to say that I do not think that I am “attacking” Mann or Longfellow by questioning the additions and by questioning whether they have the support of those communities.

The only reason those additions are necessary is that the district is closing someone else’s neighborhood school. When Mann was in danger of being closed, I saw Mann parents speaking at board meetings about the importance of preserving existing schools and the neighborhoods they serve. I agreed with those parents, and I was (and still am) against closing Mann or any of the district’s existing schools. I’m also completely in favor of making the improvements at those schools that were part of Scenario 1c, such as adding air conditioning and multi-purpose rooms.

But by closing Hoover and adding almost the same number of seats to Longfellow and Mann, the district is essentially consolidating three schools into two big schools. I don’t see how it helps the kids at Mann to bring 180 more kids in, or how it makes it a better school, or how it benefits those schools’ neighbors. As I see it, it is simply a plan to close a school and move toward having fewer, larger, farther-away-on-average elementary schools. I don’t think there is majority public support for that approach. The scenarios that included those additions (which were always accompanied by school closings) were not popular at the community workshops. In any event, by questioning that idea – because I want to keep all our existing schools open – I certainly don’t mean to “attack” either of those schools.

I’d be very interested to talk with you or anyone at Mann or Longfellow about the long-term plan. I think the school board should make a real effort to survey those communities to see how they feel about adding so many more kids to those schools. If it’s true that those communities support the additions, that would be important to know. I might even be persuaded that those particular expansions make sense. But I hope you’ll understand that, to a Hoover family, it’s hard to see how those additions (as opposed to just the necessary improvements) aren’t just the district’s way of closing Hoover School.
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Frequently unanswered question

The district has posted its responses to frequently asked questions about the Hoover closure. There’s a glaring omission from the list: What will the district do with the property?

Remember, the district’s long-term plan allocates millions of dollars to replace Hoover’s capacity elsewhere, including on two very questionable proposals to super-size Mann and Longfellow schools. Yet nothing in the plan (or in the FAQ) answers the most basic questions about what the Hoover property will be used for, or what that use will cost.

How can you make a “long-term plan” for a piece of property without having any idea what you will do with that property, what you will spend doing it, or what benefit you will get from it?

The FAQ repeatedly asserts that the property will be “needed” for the expansion of City High. So how? How can it be a “need” if no one can articulate what City will use it for?

What’s the big secret?
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Our “grassroots” educational system

When I’m lucky, my readers write my posts for me. From a reader email:

From an article in The Gazette about Saturday detention:

“I am in favor of supporting what the principals need for their buildings,” said Ann Feldmann, assistant superintendent for the Iowa City schools. “What we don’t want to do is create a program and force it upon our buildings. It has to be a grassroots sort of program.”

Too bad they don’t feel that way about PBIS.

Good point. My kids’ education has been an uninterrupted story of programs foisted on their school from above. Moreover, “grassroots” can’t just mean high-level administrators deferring to lower-level administrators in a system that’s almost entirely insulated from what the community itself wants. Who are the real grass roots?
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